


The Little Mystic and his Handler

by JennaCupcakes



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Sibling Bonding, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-06
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-05-03 04:31:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14560932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JennaCupcakes/pseuds/JennaCupcakes
Summary: When the battle over Endor is over, Leia has lost another father but gained a brother. Now it's time to figure out what that means.





	The Little Mystic and his Handler

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Dessa's 'Children's Work', which also inspired this work. Give it a listen.

 

“I never told you how he died.”

Luke seeks Leia out about a week after the battle of Endor as she is heading down a corridor to a storage room on the Home One. She’s looking for some old datapads on past diplomatic missions. Over the past week, she has been running short on diplomatic vocabulary, stuck on a proposal to the senate, and she’s hoping for inspiration.

The air is stuffy on the ship, the air filters have been working overtime again and the heating is set too high. The air is dry. It makes the hair on Leia’s arms stand up.

“Who?” she asks absentmindedly, because she doesn’t appreciate Luke’s tendency for being cryptic he brought with him from Dagobah.

“Our father,” Luke says.

Leia stops abruptly. Somehow, among all the things she’s had to process, this one slipped her mind.

“I assumed you killed him,” she confesses, careful to keep her voice neutral. Her true father died with Alderaan. Her heart rebels to hear the murderer of Bail Organa of Alderaan called her _father_.

“I did. Well, in a way.” Luke shakes his head. “He turned on the Emperor, in the end. Couldn’t bear to see me tortured.”

_It doesn’t erase what he’s done_ , Leia thinks. She remembers a cold, mechanical hand on her shoulder, forcing her to watch as her planet burned. You don’t forget that sort of thing. She certainly didn’t.

“You’re angry,” Luke says matter-of-factly.

“Why aren’t you?” Leia says, “He killed Kenobi.”

He killed so many people, she can’t even begin to count them all. A change of heart at the end of Vader’s life doesn’t mean much in the face of that. She turns right at the corner of a couple of shelves, hoping to find the mission recordings there. Luke follows her, slowly.

“Obi-Wan told me that Darth Vader killed my father. It’s what he believed: That there was truly nothing left of my father behind that mask. But he could have killed me in Cloud City and he didn’t, and so I took a gamble.”

Leia turns to give him a look. “You took a gamble?”

“A little trick I picked up from Han,” Luke replies.

She scoffs, turns away.

“Isn’t that worse, though? If your father–” She pauses. “If our father was in there all those years, that makes him complicit.”

She’s staring at shelves, trying to recall the face of Bail Organa, finding it morphs into Darth Vader’s mask again and again. It’s frustrating. It scares her.

“The Emperor was truly evil, Leia. I think you must know what I mean. His presence… It’s the dark side. It takes from you. It makes you feel like there’s no way out. When I watched the fleet get decimated over Endor, I almost fell for it myself. If I hadn’t known you and Han were out there, if I hadn’t felt with every fibre of my being you were alive–”

Leia turns, and catches Luke looking down at his hands, one human, one robotic.

“I don’t know what I would have done. I might have turned myself. I very nearly did when Vader was threatening you up there. Threatening to go after you if I wouldn’t turn to the dark side.”

That takes Leia aback. She thinks Luke sees it or feels it, because he looks up and smiles at her.

“I was beaten. The Emperor threatened to kill me. He _was_ killing me. I could feel my life Force slipping away. And then Vader stepped in and threw him down.”

There is a pause in which Luke composes himself.

“It must have fried the machinery which kept him alive, but I also think that turning on the Emperor unlocked something in him that he’s been trying to keep sealed away for a really long time. You don’t just live with that sort of darkness once you recognise it for what it is. He came back from it, but it took its toll on him.”

Another pause.

“I looked him in the eyes one last time. Took off his mask. He didn’t even look human anymore, really. But his eyes…”

It’s that last thought that Luke never finishes. Leia doesn’t know what to say.

Luke told her that whatever mystical force he is using, she has it, too. She wishes she could reach out right now and understand what happened to Luke since he left them on Hoth. It seems that out of the three of them, he did the most growing up in the shortest span of time. She can tell it cost him.

“I wanted you to know,” Luke says, “I wanted you to know that while our father was a monster, in the end, he chose not to be one.”

Leia looks at Luke and tries to see a brother. In the palace, she had friends, but she didn’t have any siblings – her mother couldn’t have children – and so she had always been the sole heir to the throne, which was a very lonely place to be. She’d always wanted brothers or sisters. Now, she has a brother, but the only thing they share is the terrible burden of a legacy that is tied to both the Empire and the Alliance.

“Thank you,” she finally chooses to say.

* * *

Leia feels like she hasn’t slept since Endor.

She knows it’s not entirely true – there are those moments of blissful unconsciousness in the desk chair in her quarters on the flagship of the Alliance fleet, and she slept on the outbound shuttle from Endor. But she hasn’t slept much since, and certainly not in a bed. And it’s starting to show.

The words on the datapad are blurring as she stares them down, willing them to assume a shape she can make sense of. She needs to finish this report. She needs to finish before she can sleep. Force knows there’s barely anyone else left to do the work, certainly not the work she does. Mon Mothma is a skilled senator, but Leia is the posterchild of the Alliance, the daughter of Bail Organa. They need _her_ to get the senate to listen.

But she can’t focus.

She sighs, putting down the datapad and rubbing at her eyes. Maybe the Alliance won’t fall apart just because she gets ten minutes of shut-eye before returning to this.

She closes her eyes, and right on cue, the images come flooding back. Han, frozen in carbonite, is always at the front of her mind. She can’t put his pained expression to rest in her mind, no matter how many times she sees him smile at her over some repairs on the Falcon, or over breakfast, or at night in his quarters. And then there’s Luke – pale, stern Luke, nothing like the boy she tossed into a trash chute on the Death Star. Her _brother_.

Her muscles are twitching from exhaustion. Eventually, she opens her eyes again.

Sleep won’t come.

The letters are still blurry, but she makes it work.

* * *

 “Have you spoken to the senate about the outer rim territories yet?”

Luke begins to seek her out more often.

They’re on their way back from a rendezvous with Han, who just returned from a covert mission for the Alliance, only to take off again for the next one, doing what he does best. Leia tells Mon Mothma about as much of these missions as she tells Luke, which is not much. It’s better to leave Mon Mothma with plausible deniability, and Luke with as little cause to worry about his friend as possible. Leia has always been an excellent juggler of secrets and information. But it pains her to see Han leave again so soon.

The outer rim is Luke’s pet project. He sees the fall of the Empire as a unique chance to bring it back into the fold of the New Republic, to finally bring the law back to planets that have lived in lawlessness even under the Republic.

“I haven’t,” Leia says. She understands where Luke is coming from – he’s seen the slavery on Tatooine, and after her experience in Jabba’s palace she understands why he can’t wait.

“I don’t think these senators know what to do with actual power,” she adds, “They didn’t have any under the Empire. Every time I petition them to do something, they stare at me like nunas.”

Luke laughs at the image, in part because he must have seen the look that Leia describes. Leia shakes her head.

“And then, yesterday, one of them had the gall to ask me who I thought I was to tell them how to organise the new elections – that I wasn’t even a senator anymore now that my planet was gone!”

It didn’t even hurt in the moment, Leia muses, because she had been so appalled. But as she recounts the words of the senator, she recognises the sliver of pain that wedged in her chest nonetheless. It aches.

Luke is quiet, but Leia thinks she can feel a wave of outrage rolling off him, even though no outward sign betrays it. It’s like she is more in touch with Luke, like they’re tuned to a common frequency. Brother and sister by blood, they are only now slowly getting to know each other in person – but every move Luke makes she can anticipate by a split second. She thinks they would be terrible at sabbac against each other.

“You could run again, you know. You _should_.”

Luke is looking ahead, down the corridor they’re following back to the command centre. Why Luke keeps wearing black, Leia can’t say. It makes him look older, darker. He is still hurt, as are they all, so maybe he wants to express his mourning of all the things he lost while fighting the Empire.

 “I can’t,” she replies, “I’m a senator of Alderaan and I will use that to represent the Alliance as long as Mon Mothma asks me to. But I can’t just run as another planet’s senator. I don’t belong anywhere except Alderaan.”

The thought saddens her. She _wants_ to stay involved in this impossible project, she wants to not just see the New Republic take shape but actively _form_ it, but if she stands for re-election somewhere else, it will feel like a betrayal. She is the last living piece of Alderaan, and she will make sure the New Republic will not forget. She will stare down the senators that allowed this evil to take shape, that didn’t prevent the Emperor from building a weapon that could destroy planets and make them _listen_.

Complicit. All of them.

Sometimes she wonders if this stubbornness is the true legacy of Vader she carries. Politics is a fine line of being uncompromising and bending at the right time, after all, and Vader was not the Empire’s tool for diplomacy. Likewise, Leia doesn’t bend, either.

“That’s alright,” Luke says, “It was just a thought. I know how much you care about these elections.”

They would be a step away from the Empire. The most important step, maybe. Leia wanted _all_ of the senators to stand for re-election, no matter how long their term was still supposed to go. The galaxy needed a clean break, a fresh start, even as Leia advocated for institutional continuity for the sake of stability.

After the elections, she’d move on to the administrative level. Complicit. Even there, people had been complicit. Every defector shamed their colleagues who had remained behind, working for a regime they knew to be unjust.

“Who said that, by the way?” Luke asked, “The senator, who was he?”

“Hm?” Leia said, lost in her thoughts of all the tasks ahead of her, “Oh, I think he was the Bilbringi senator. Lorren Tothel.”

“And he’s opposed to the elections?” Luke asks.

“I’m not sure if he’s opposed to the election or opposed to the Alliance playing such a big role in organising them,” Leia says, “Maybe he’s hoping to carve out a better place for himself. Revolutions are a place for opportunists, too.”

They pause in front of the doors of the command centre. Leia wonders if she sounds jaded to Luke, who always seems sound so optimistic and hopeful. But maybe his second time on the Death Star taught him something about the ugly sides of life, because he doesn’t object.

Leia knows too much of people to think very highly of them. But in her heart, she knows that is always because she has seen so many people do better, to rise to the ideal that they all dream of. Luke is one of these people.

“Why don’t you bring me with you, the next time you meet with the senators?” Luke asks just as Leia is about to say her goodbyes. It stops her in her tracks.

“How would that help?” she asks.

Luke puts a hand on the lightsaber at his belt.

“The image of a Jedi still means something to those senators,” he says, “Back in the old Republic, the Jedi were diplomats, negotiators…”

He pauses, pursing his lips.

“I’m only one Jedi, but if I show that I threw my lot in with you, it may convince some senators who are on the fence.”

Leia looks at Luke with wide eyes. Her brother is more skilled at politics than she would have assumed for a naive farmboy. If this is what the Force can do, she will never again make fun of it, she vows.

“Luke, I…”

“It’s alright, we don’t have to come up with a working plan immediately. Just bring me with you to the next senatorial meeting. I promise I’ll be quiet and try my best to look as disapproving as Ben.”

Leia laughs. “Luke, I think it’s a good idea. A very good idea, indeed.”

* * *

“Can I come in?”

Leia is carefully sticking her head through the doors into Luke’s quarters. She’d knocked, before, but there was no response despite Luke being off-duty and it being daytime. But there he is sitting, right in the middle of his quarters, legs folded under him, and a number of objects levitating in the air around him.

“Sure.”

Leia didn’t really expect a response, but Luke seems at ease. She can’t tell if he’s meditating or practising, but apparently, he does it effortlessly.

Leia lets herself in and closes the door again. Luke has his eyes closed, and he’s making no move to get up, so Leia sits down on a chair by the wall. Technically, she’s here with a proposal from Mon Mothma, but that can wait, she decides. The room is filled with a reverberating calmness that echoes deep in her bones.

Sometimes her thoughts spin so fast that they set her whole body on fire. Today is one of these days, a little bit, and as she eases down into a chair she wonders if that is why she sought out Luke. With every day, he is becoming more like the Jedi she imagined from her father’s stories – calm, wise, old. He has aged above all. But Luke’s presence calms her also because besides Han, he is now the only family she still has, and will have for some time.

Of course, she has talked with Han about children. Before the Empire fell, it was a clandestine fantasy, something they felt silly for thinking about. Han tried to shrug it off at first, like he didn’t care much either way, but his eyes lit up when Leia described their little boy, the endless expanse of fields, and a day with nothing else to worry about besides how to make each other happy. She never admitted that the fields were plucked straight from her memories of Alderaan, but she suspects that Han knew, nevertheless. Now that they are at peace, she has been talking with Han again, but they have a long future ahead of them.

She smiles when she notices that without much trying, her thoughts have calmed. Luke is still in the same position he was before, legs folded under him, his eyes closed, objects levitating around him, but he is smiling, too. It’s hard to hide anything about her emotional state from him, although she has asked him if it is possible to learn. She doesn’t want him to become a liability to her.

For now, she leans back, and closes her eyes. A curious part of her tries to reach out, picturing Han, who is light years away on Nar Shadaa or Force knows where, doing things even she was better off not knowing about. She is only a little startled when her thoughts are rewarded with the sensation of a slow, bright, glowing pulse.

_Like father, like daughter_ , she thinks. Or maybe, _like brother, like sister_.

* * *

“In the light of this, I can only reiterate: We want continuity and stability as much as you do. In fact, we believe it is vital for the wellbeing of billions of beings throughout the galaxy. We do not want a civil war. But we also want those who have been wronged under the Empire, those who have been suppressed and hurt to see that justice is being done. That the Republic they lost thirty years ago is more enduring than the evil that dictators tried to impose on it. That this senate will hear their complaints. For that, elections are the only way. If any of you senators now lives in fear of losing their seat, maybe you should ask yourself why that is, and why you didn’t stand up against the Empire as many did. As Mon Mothma did. As Bail Organa did. And as I did.”

Leia steps away from the mic and takes a deep breath. The applause throughout the senate chamber is muted but steady. She expected worse.

She turns around to Luke, whose gaze is fixed ahead, a dark robe over his shoulders, and whose gloved hand rests, calmly, on his lightsaber.

“Do you think they heard me?” she asks.

Luke smiles a little, cryptic smile. “I think they heard you loud and clear.”

The next day, Leia’s image is plastered across the front pages of all major holonews outlets. ‘Defender of Democracy’, it says in bold black letters on them. In the background, Luke looks more like a figure from a distant myth.

* * *

“Ah, the last Jedi!”

The new senator of Gaala is a balding human in his fifties, who carries most of his weight around the waist, but Leia is not fooled by his friendly-old-man act for a minute. She followed his election campaign closely.

Luke smiles courtly at the greeting and shakes the hand he is offered. “Luke Skywalker, sir.”

“Mouren Hetria. Please, call me Mouren.”

Leia shakes his hand, too. His handshake is firm, almost too much for Leia’s taste, who had not expected that kind of gesture of bland dominance. She is almost disappointed. She expected a little more subtlety.

“Leia Organa.”

“Ah, yes. Alderaan’s lost child. We’re very sorry for your loss here.”

Luke casts Leia a glance she can only acknowledge from the corner of her eye, but it feels good to know that he is there and finds Hetria’s act exactly as exaggerated as she does. But she is a trained diplomat, and Luke is… something, so they move past it. They are professionals. They save the gossiping for the flight home in the Falcon.

“Thank you for your kind words, senator,” Leia says as they move down the passage from the cab landing pad to the senatorial residence. Gaala is a barren world, hewn mostly from stone, but Leia sees beauty in it nonetheless. She spends precious little time planetside these days, so every world she can set foot on is a blessing.

“Oh, there is no need to thank me. In fact, I believe it is you who is owed our gratitude for your tireless work against the Emperor and his cronies. You are an inspiration, Senator Organa.”

The title, which had once belonged to her father, still feels like an ill-fitting coat at times. Nevertheless, it is an heirloom she wears with pride.

“Thank you, Senator,” Leia says.

“And of course, we all want to thank the Jedi hero! To bring hope to the galaxy at a time like this! What a sign the Force has provided in you!”

Luke has been walking behind them, a step to the back at Leia’s right-hand side. When Hetria wants to talk to him, he has to turn and try to glance around Leia, which Leia knows is just how Luke likes it. He hates the attention, doesn’t want praise.

But a lot of people want _his_ attention, now that he’s shown himself.

“The Force works in mysterious ways, senator,” Luke says calmly, which Leia understands is the Jedi equivalent of _water is wet, at least on most planets_. Still, it seems to satisfy most senators hungry for a piece of Jedi wisdom.

“I believe congratulations are in order for your election victory, senator!” Leia interjects. She knows her cues, just as Luke does.

“Oh, please!” Hetria says, “Gaala deserves someone far younger and energetic, but many young people are leaving. Not many people still live here. They hope to find more life on the inner worlds, and they are right.”

Leia knows of Gaala’s demographic problems. Rich in resources needed in ship-building, Gaala drew a lot of mining companies but repelled their educated youth. Under the Empire, the mining companies had set up a quasi-extractive state that had aimed to squeeze every last bit of profit out of the place. Hetria’s victory was in part so astounding because it had happened against this background of business interests and bribery.

“Mon Mothma wants me to convey the Alliance’s congratulations, too,” Leia adds, “You will certainly be a man to watch out for once the new senate convenes.”

They reach a set of double doors which opens for them.

“I heard you didn’t stand for re-election,” Hetria says.

“I am representing the Alliance in the new senate, but only for one term,” Leia explains, “As soon as the transition period is over, the Alliance will disband. The last thing the New Republic needs is a paramilitary pushing it on its way.”

“Admirable,” Hetria comments, and Leia can’t tell whether he means it or not. “And what about our young Jedi? No political aspirations? What world are you from, Master Jedi?”

“I am not a Master yet, sir,” Luke says, “Only a Jedi Knight. And the Jedi do not engage in politics.”

“Of course,” Hetria says, “Well, you’ll no doubt be busy building a new order, won’t you? We certainly could use a few Jedi around.”

Luke smiles. “We certainly could.”

Judging by Hetria’s pause, he notices the lack of an answer, but his awe of the Jedi forbids him from inquiring further. Sometimes Leia wonders if Luke _enjoys_ being cryptic. She knows he has a mischievous streak, but she also knows that he doesn’t want people to be in awe of the Jedi, not really. He just agreed to be her red nuna, a curiosity to keep the new senators interested in what Leia has to say. As an act, it works like a charm every time: here comes the Jedi and his handler.

“Well, you’ll no doubt want refreshments,” Hetria said, “Please, follow me…”

Luke and Leia exchange a glance as Hetria takes the lead. She feels as if she can almost tell what Luke is thinking.

* * *

“And then he asked Luke to _perform something using the Force over dinner!_ ”

Han almost spits out his drink laughing as Leia concludes her story.

They’re back on the Falcon, Chewie’s monitoring the scanners as they fly through hyperspace, while Luke, Leia, and Han are huddled up in the common room. Leia is sitting on the bench, her knees drawn to her chest and leaning on Han when she is not using both of her arms to underline her story. Luke is sitting across from them, leaning back on the bench, looking serene. They’ve each got a bottle of Corusca ale in front of them. It almost feels like old times.

“And what did you say, Luke?” Han asks. “Did you empty the water pitcher over his head with the Force?”

It’s Leia’s turn to almost spit out her beer. “Han!”

“What?” Han says, “He made it sound like Luke was some kind of Force sensitive performance nuna.”

Luke chuckles. “It’s not the first time this has happened, believe me. For all their talk of faith in the Force, people are awfully desperate for a miracle.”

“Well, I still believe you’re full of shit, kid,” Han says with a wink.

* * *

They’re on their way back from Coruscant, another session of the senate concluded. Leia will get to rendezvous with the fleet after two weeks’ absence, and Luke is itching to be back among his pilots, Leia can tell. He gets antsy when he can only be a Jedi for too long.

Han doesn’t fly them to their senatorial meetings. He doesn’t like Coruscant, still a Corellia boy through and through in that, but Leia knows he also values the freedom to just take off during those weeks when she’s in session. She is happy for him.

Luke brings them into hyperspace, ever the pilot, while Leia browses the minutes of a working group meeting she wasn’t able to attend. At last, Luke leans back in his seat.

“Three hours until we’re at the collection point. Mon Mothma says she looks forward to seeing you.”

Leia smiles. “She always gets so worried. Bail always called her my second mother hen. He was, of course, the first.”

That makes Luke laugh. “I wish I could have met him.”

“Oh, he would have liked you,” Leia says. The years are slowly softening the blow of losing her father. She is beginning to take delight in seeing things he would have enjoyed. She takes comfort in the fact she is living up to his legacy.

“I went through the senate records while you were in session,” Luke says suddenly, “I was looking for records of our mother.”

“Our mother,” Leia repeats. Despite all the likeness she feels towards Luke, their relation by blood always seems so confined to the shadow of their father. She knows they must have had a mother, but it’s a distant concept. Who could have ever loved Darth Vader?

“She was a senator from Naboo. Padmé Amidala. The Former Queen of Naboo, too.”

“Are you telling me I am heir to _another_ monarchy?” Leia says incredulously.

 Luke laughs. “No. Naboo’s monarchy is not hereditary, apparently. Don’t ask me how it works.”

“Oh, good,” Leia says.

“What was she like?” she asks, then. “Our mother?”

“She was a highly respected senator. I’ve seen pictures of her. Here–“ Luke pulls a datapad out of his bag and hands it to Leia. “If there are any senators old enough to remember her, no doubt you reminded them of her when you gave your speech before the elections.”

Leia activates the datapad and sees herself face to face with a woman who looks like her double. The same honest eyes, the same round face and lips.

“She…”

Leia lacks the words.

“I know,” Luke says.

Leia stares at the picture for a long time. It kindles something warm inside of her, in the place where she thought the sting of Darth Vader as her father could never heal.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is an odd one. I've always been fascinated with Leia and Luke, the siblings who had too much thrust upon them. How can you be siblings, but also the people that saved the galaxy at the same time? This is my attempt at an answer.
> 
> Come find me on tumblr at veganthranduil.


End file.
